Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead. Peter Rodman is dead. And memory is dying
with them.

Over the weekend, Solzhenitsyn, the 89-year-old literary titan, and Rodman,
the American foreign policy intellectual, passed away. I knew Rodman and
liked him very much. We were partners in a debate at Oxford University last
year. He provided the gravitas. A former protege of Henry Kissinger and
high-ranking official in two Republican administrations, Rodman was one of
the wisest of the wise men of the conservative foreign policy establishment.
Calm, elegant, dryly funny, brilliant, but most of all gentlemanly. He died
too young, at 64, of leukemia.

Solzhenitsyn was, of course, a landmark of the 20th century, one of the few
authors capable of elevating literature to the stuff of world affairs.

What I admired most in both men was their memory. They remembered important
things, specifically the evil of communism. And, perhaps nearly as
important, they remembered who recognized that evil and who did not.

Rodman, for example, was an architect of the Reagan Doctrine in places such
as Angola and Afghanistan. One of his books, "More Precious Than Peace: The
Cold War and the Struggle for the Third World," was the quintessential
defense of thwarting the Soviets in ugly spots of the globe where Americans
were understandably reluctant to spend blood or treasure.

In Berlin on July 24, Barack Obama's history of the Cold War sounded
cheerier. There was a lot of unity and "standing as one," and we dropped
some candy on Berlin, and now we need to be unified like we were then.

But unity was hardly the defining feature of the Cold War. There were
supposed allies reluctant to help and official enemies who were eager to do
their share. There were Russians - like Solzhenitsyn - who bravely told the
world about Soviet barbarity. Here at home, there were a great many
Americans, including intellectual heirs to the "useful idiots" Lenin relied
on, who rolled their eyes at self-styled "cold warriors" such as Rodman. And
from Vietnam through the SANE/Freeze movement, liberal resolve and unity
were aimed most passionately against America's policies - not the Soviet
Union's.

Having recently published a book on fascism, I think I understand why so
many people refused to see the evil in communism. It was well-intentioned.
The Soviets were our allies in World War II. Communists spoke of socialism
and liberation, and their agents, friends and apologists in the U.S. were
comrades in arms with Americans battling racism. But it's worth remembering
how evil Communist governments really were. Stalin murdered more people than
Hitler. The hammer-and-sickle's stack of bones towers high above the
swastika's. "The Black Book of Communism," a scholarly accounting of
communism's crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed
champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say
that number is too low.

If, after the moral cataclysm that was the Holocaust, you wish to say that
the Nazis were more evil than the Soviets, fine. But don't roll your eyes at
serious people who consider anti-communism no less honorable and righteous
than anti-Nazism. Look to the Holomodor in Ukraine, where 4 million to 6
million people were murdered and a culture largely erased. Terror, purges,
massacres, assassinations and the forced starvation of millions - these are
all horrors that we rightly associate with Nazism but somehow fail to
correlate with communism.

In 1974, when the New Yorker reviewed Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag
Archipelago," George Steiner wrote: "To infer that the Soviet Terror is as
hideous as Hitlerism is not only a brutal oversimplification but a moral
indecency." When Ronald Reagan denounced the "evil empire" - because it was
evil and it was an empire - he too was accused of absurd oversimplification.

The real brutal oversimplification is the treacle we hear from Obama, that
victory in the Cold War was some Hallmark-movie lesson in global
hand-holding. The reality is that it was a long slog, and throughout, the
champions of "unity" wanted to capitulate to this evil, and the champions of
freedom were rewarded with ridicule.

"This is the moment," Obama proclaimed, "when every nation in Europe must
have the chance to choose its own tomorrow free from the shadows of
yesterday." Rodman and Solzhenitsyn understood that such talk was
dangerously naive. People free from the "shadows of yesterday" forget things
they swore never to forget.

Solzhenitsyn and Rodman are gone now, and a generation that learned such
hard lessons is leaving us too quickly. The amnesia bites a little deeper.